The only realistic way GOG gets shafted is if Steam starts selling the same titles for less.

I love GOG but only as much as they make it easy to get the classics at a fair price. Steam makes downloading easier but their price point is usually a little too high.

But there are always going to be games and there will always be publishers trying to extend the profitability of their games.

There's still A LOT to add from publishers already on GOG. Also EA, Eidos and Lucasarts (and others) have yet to join the party and by the time their catalog is up, today's good games will have become good old games. And i do believe that once all the great classics are available, gog.com will be a self-sustaining affair as long as there will be people to appreciate these games.

And as bandwidth is getting cheaper i don't think anyone needs to worry about big files in the future.

Why shouldn't GOG compete directly with Steam? GOG offers better products (due to their DRM-free status) with, usually, better prices. No need to have a third party client running to play your games. No need for an active Internet connection limiting where/when you can play (yes, Steam does offer an offline mode but it doesn't work). No chance of being screwed over by a change in T&C's (Steam and similar services like GamersGate or Impulse could bring in a subscription fee, forcing users to pay extra to maintain access to games they previously purchased).

GOG already includes quite recent games from 2006-7 (King's Bounty The Legend, Empire Earth III and Two Worlds for example) so it shouldn't be too great a jump to include more current ones also.

As for bandwith costs, these hardly amount to anything significant. Rackspace's Basic One offers 2TB for $419 - 4.77 cents per GB. So the biggest game that could fit onto one DVD (9GB dual layer) would cost under 45 cents in bandwith.

Steam only owns the Valve games. The developers and publishers including Steam on their games only have it as an acceptable DRM scheme. Once these games become old and pirated anyway, a developer wanting to have their old property on GOG and reaching new customers who never bothered to have it when new can simply decide to release it without Steam and have GOG making it work on Windows 12 instead of that old and clunky Windows 7 antique.

As to the size of files being too big or expensive for GOG, all the games GOG is selling now were huge and expensive in their day. An 8 gigs download might be trivial ten years from now, just like a 700 megs download is now, but was not ten years ago.

Even if GOG never got any new publishers (which I doubt will happen), they could probably have years' worth of new releases just from the publishers already on here. I mean, they've got a deal with Atari, but haven't released Alone in the Dark 1. Sierra, but haven't released King's Quest 1, or the Quest for Glory series, or Shivers . . .

My point is, we're not in any danger of running out of old games. I think GOG's current business model will continue to work for a long time.

There is so many games that they have to release, and if they ever do run out of games, they can start releasing games from now because it would have taken so long.. lol.

Indeed. I can't think of reasons (other than borking multiplayer, but there's GameRanger for stuff like that) why a Steamworks game such as Civilization V can't appear in ten year's time, for example.

Not all new games are necessarily expensive, especially not the independent/obscure titles. Ex Mortis 3 came out last year for download at a price of $20. The Lost Crown came out two years ago and is currently sold at download sites for $15. Penumbra and Amnesia are around the same price. It's not unreasonable to think that years from now, when they're old enough to be on this site, they'd be worth $10 or even $6.

Hell yeah, they should definitely get Quest for Glory IV and V!!

Games that use Steamworks often have that (multiplayer & achievements) part ripped out on other DD sites. I see no reason why GOG versions would be any different.

If I were you I would not think of such long perspective - I don't think even gog team knows where they want to be in 10 years. You should ask yourself: “How well will The Wither 2 sell?”. This is crucial when you think of gog.com future. The game’s budget was over 10 M $. If it’s going to be fiasco – CD Projekt/Optimus are in trouble. Well I don’t think that happens, after all The Wither was a success – but you never know.

I think that the biggest threat for GOGs future is compatibility.

In terms of service and prices they are competitive, even with Steam.

But if the next generations of Windows come out (Windows 8, 9, 10, ...) or more users switch to Mac, or consoles get more popular than PCs, than making old games compatible with that will be more and more difficult. DOS games work well because there is a good emulator. However, do they want to write emulators for Windows XP, Vista, 7 as well as time goes by...?

And multi player parts are even more based on the presence of special services (match making, savegame storage, buying DLCs, ...) it might be increasingly difficult to emulate these.

If gaming changes altogether and gamers are left with a client alone and servers do the whole work (even for single player games), e.g. like browser games, the whole model of GOG (DRM free....) is at stake.

However in the next two years, without a new Windows and many old games still available, the near future looks good for GOG. They have a successful niche which could be described as: "Smaller and simpler than Steam - you can do everything - cheap - only older und less known titles".